The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to announce the exhibition Dark Wave Forms, with new works by the English painter Sean Dawson (b. 1964).

Restlessness. Movement. Metamorphosis. The works of Sean Dawson seem constant in their characteristic combination of a moment captured and the unpredictable diffusion of their elements.

Photographs from the worlds of architecture and fashion provide the source material for Sean Dawson’s compositions, which he manipulates and defamiliarizes in a multilayered process. Moreover, the music he listens to while working on them, ranging from black metal to avant-garde electronic, becomes part of the paintings as well. It can be found again in the dynamic curves and folds, and parts of the titles of the music provide the titles for the paintings.

Sean Dawson creates quasi-bionic, intertwined strands and forms in unfamiliar time frames. The proverbial momentum Sean Dawson gives to his loops as they whizz around and into one another proceeds unpredictably and even chaotically but never loses coherence.

All the while the background of his works is closed off from the viewer: the heterotextuality of the paintings does not permit familiar spatial orientation; the forms of their elements seem familiar and yet foreign. At the same time, episodic observation of individual details produces in turn new relationships of space and form.

Sean Dawson’s works manage to call visual habits into question, to make the creative process their theme, and hence to freeze the creation of the painting, in a sense. The interplay of space and matter in Sean Dawson’s paintings results in a depth that makes him a sort of creator of abstract illusionism.